Category: Leaks

Now that Jeff Sessions is Donald Trump’s pick for attorney general, you’re going to hear a lot of people dig up old accusations that Sessions is a racist. In fact, CNN did so last night. However, between the nature of the accusations and Sessions’s actual record of desegregating schools and taking on the Klan in Alabama, it strains credulity to believe that he is a racist.

These accusations all center around the bruising judicial nomination process Sessions went through in 1986. Ronald Reagan had tapped Sessions to serve on the federal bench and the Senate judiciary committee ultimately rejected him after they heard testimony that he had supposedly called the ACLU and NAACP “un-American” and “communist-inspired,” as well as made racist remarks. The accusations came from Thomas Figures, a black assistant U.S. attorney who worked for Sessions who said Sessions called him “boy” and had made a joke about how he thought the KKK was “O.K. until [he] found out they smoked pot.” Another prosecutor, J. Gerald Hebert, said Sessions had called a white lawyer “a disgrace to his race” for representing black clients.

There is no concrete reason to doubt Figures or Herbert. Sessions vehemently denied calling Figures “boy,” but he didn’t rebut the substance of some of the claims—though he asserted they were taken out of context. It’s not exactly inaccurate to point out that the NAACP and ACLU were “communist-inspired.” He said he thought it absurd to think he would make a pro-KKK joke considering he was prosecuting the Klan at the time he made the remark. And for what it’s worth, Figures also directed accusations at a another assistant U.S. Attorney who worked with Figures. That assistant U.S. Attorney also said Figures wasn’t telling the truth and defended Sessions’s integrity. Ultimately, the charges were no more than hearsay.

However, it’s worth noting that Senator Ted Kennedy, on the Senate judiciary committee at the time, seemed heavily invested in tanking Sessions nomination. The next year, Kennedy’s crusade was to sink Robert Bork’s nomination to the Supreme Court, which has generally been regarded as a shameful smear campaign ever since. The episode upended the comity that had previously existed between the Senate and the White House on Supreme Court nominations—Antonin Scalia was approved to the court 98-0 the year before, the same year that Sessions was filleted by Kennedy and Democrats on the judiciary committee. Perhaps Sessions was a trial run for “Borking.”

In 2009, Sessions himself told me that “When I got to Washington, there had been an orchestrated campaign to smear my record, and it was executed with great care. And I, frankly, was a babe in the woods and wasn’t sufficiently prepared for it.” For that reason, when Sessions got to the Senate he has always been more deferential toward nominations than most of his GOP colleagues. For instance, he was one of the only Republican senators to support Eric Holder’s nomination for attorney general.

Sessions’s actual track record certainly doesn’t suggest he’s a racist. Quite the opposite, in fact. As a U.S. Attorney he filed several cases to desegregate schools in Alabama. And he also prosecuted Klansman Henry Francis Hays, son of Alabama Klan leader Bennie Hays, for abducting and killing Michael Donald, a black teenager selected at random. Sessions insisted on the death penalty for Hays. When he was later elected the state Attorney General, Sessions followed through and made sure Hays was executed. The successful prosecution of Hays also led to a $7 million civil judgment against the Klan, effectively breaking the back of the KKK in Alabama.

As a U.S. attorney, he also prosecuted a group of civil rights activists, which included a former aide to Martin Luther King Jr., for voter fraud in Perry County, Alabama. The case fell apart, and Sessions bluntly told me he “failed to make the case.” This incident has also been used to claim that Sessions is racist—but it shouldn’t be. The county has been dogged with accusations of voter fraud for decades. In 2008, state and federal officials investigated voter fraud in Perry County after “a local citizens group gathered affidavits detailing several cases in which at least one Democratic county official paid citizens for their votes, or encouraged them to vote multiple times.” A detailed story in theTuscaloosa News reported that voting patterns in one Perry County town were also mighty suspicious in 2012: “Uniontown has a population of 1,775, according to the 2010 census but, according to the Perry County board of registrars, has 2,587 registered voters. The total votes cast thereTuesday—1,431—represented a turnout of 55 percent of the number of registered voters and a whopping 80.6 percent of the town’s population.”

Perhaps there are a lot of ideological reasons for liberals to be upset about Sessions becoming attorney general. But I don’t think the character attacks on the man can be taken seriously.

Correction: A previous version of this post identified Henry Francis Hays as an Alabama KKK head. He was actually the son of one: Bennie Hays, who, per his obituary, was accused of “instigating” the murder for which Henry Hays was executed. The story has been updated.

Update: Suffice it to say, because I didn’t specifically detail Sessions involvement in the prosecution of Hays’s case, some online critics are claiming I’m trying to give Sessions credit for something he did not do. The short answer is that’s not what happened, but the long answer is that it’s complicated. Let’s review what I wrote above:

And he also prosecuted Klansman Henry Francis Hays, son of Alabama Klan leader Bennie Hays, for abducting and killing Michael Donald, a black teenager selected at random. Sessions insisted on the death penalty for Hays. When he was later elected the state Attorney General, Sessions followed through and made sure Hays was executed. The successful prosecution of Hays also led to a $7 million civil judgment against the Klan, effectively breaking the back of the KKK in Alabama.

That characterization of Sessions’s involvement in Henry Francis Hays was based on this quote from when I interviewed Sessions in 2009: “I prosecuted the head of the Klan for murdering somebody, and I insisted the klansman be given the death penalty. When I became attorney general years later, I handled that appeal and ensured that he was, in fact, executed.”

At the time I wrote this seven years ago, and when I wrote the piece Friday, I did not understand this to be Sessions saying he “prosecuted” Hays in the narrow sense of the word or that he was trying to take credit for the work of the Mobile County district attorney. Hays was obviously tried in state court. However, Sessions’s office did a lot of initial investigation and legwork on the case, and my understanding was that Sessions worked with the DA to make sure that the case got into state court specifically for the reason of seeking the death penalty. And in fact, a recent CBS News report notes that in Sessions’s failed judiciary confirmation hearings in 1986 Sessions testified “he had been involved in the decision to try one of the killers in state court so he could face the death penalty.” That has not been disputed since then, so far as I can tell.

Sessions later brought up Hays’s accomplice and Hays’s father on federal charges related to the murder—a 1985 AP story quotes Sessions saying “justice has been done” after his office got a life sentence in federal court for Hays’s accomplice James Knowles. Between the investigative work and that it appears Sessions was working with the state on an overall prosecutorial strategy, I understood Sessions to be saying he prosecuted Hays in a broader sense. This would not be inaccurate, even if some people were confused that it did not mean that as a U.S. attorney Sessions was obviously not the guy who conducted the trial in a state court.

In any event, I would have obviated the criticism had I clarified his role here or perhaps said he was “involved in the prosecution” of Henry Francis Hays. Regardless, some critics started to get very far afoot from what I wrote, by claiming that I said Sessions “led the prosecution” of Henry Francis Hays, which is much more emphatic than what I wrote or understood to be the case.

The bottom line: Sessions was instrumental in seeing a Klan murderer charged with the death penalty, and later worked as Alabama’s attorney general to see that the death sentence was carried out swiftly, making Henry Francis Hays the first white man executed in Alabama for murdering a black person since 1913. Sessions spent the better part of two decades going after the Klan in Alabama, and that should be kept in mind when you assess the decades old charges that he is racist.

The Clinton Foundation has said it accepted a $1 million gift from the Qatari government without notifying the State Department that it had done so, an apparent violation of an ethics agreement Hillary Clinton signed when she became Secretary of State in 2009.

Under the terms of the agreement, Clinton promised the foundation would notify the State Department’s ethics official if a new foreign government wished to donate or if a current foreign donor wished to “increase materially” its contributions.

Qatari officials pledged the money in 2011 to mark former President Bill Clinton’s 65th birthday. The following April, Amitabh Desai, the Clinton Foundation’s foreign policy director, emailed several of his colleagues to say that the Qataris wanted to meet Bill Clinton “‘for five minutes’ in NYC to present [the] check.” Hillary Clinton served as secretary of state until Feb. 1, 2013.

When contacted by Reuters, which first reported on the deal’s ethical ramifications, Clinton Foundation spokesman Brian Cookstra said the $1 million gift did not constitute a “material increase” in the Middle Eastern nation’s contributions.

Reuters, citing the foundation’s own website, reported that Qatar’s own government has directly given a total of between $1 million and $5 million over the years.

The State Department told the news agency it had no record of the Qatar donation and said it was up to the foundation to submit it for review.

The number of foreign donations to the Clinton Foundation has opened the Democratic nominee up to conflict-of-interest accusations and raises the possibility that donors gave money with the expectation of receiving political favors in return.

Republican nominee Donald Trump has repeatedly called for Clinton to return donations from countries like Qatar, which has a questionable human rights record.

Last year, the Foundation admitted that no complete list of donors to its health program, the Clinton Health Access Initiative, had been published since 2010, despite promises from Clinton two years earlier that such a list would be produced annually.

The email from Desai was part of a trove of hacked messages from Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta’s account that were published by Wikileaks last month.

Sex crimes with children, child exploitation, money laundering, perjury, and pay to play, reads the partial list of crimes that, claim New York City Police Department sources, could “put Hillary and her crew away for life.”

Shocking evidence of such criminality has been found on ex-congressman Anthony Weiner’s laptop computer, claim the sources, which was seized from him by NYC officials investigating his allegedly having sent sexually explicit texts to a 15-year-old girl. Moreover, Hillary Clinton’s “crew” supposedly includes not just close aide and confidante Huma Abedin and her husband, Weiner, but other aides and insiders — and even members of Congress. According to True Pundit:

NYPD sources said these new emails include evidence linking Clinton herself and associates to:

• Money laundering

• Child exploitation

• Sex crimes with minors (children)

• Perjury

• Pay to play through Clinton Foundation

• Obstruction of justice

• Other felony crimes

NYPD detectives and a [sic] NYPD Chief, the department’s highest rank under Commissioner, said openly that if the FBI and Justice Department fail to garner timely indictments against Clinton and co- conspirators, NYPD will go public with the damaging emails now in the hands of FBI Director James Comey and many FBI field offices.

“What’s in the emails is staggering and as a father, it turned my stomach,” the NYPD Chief said. “There is not going to be any Houdini-like escape from what we found. We have copies of everything. We will ship them to Wikileaks or I will personally hold my own press conference if it comes to that.”

These allegations, if true, could explain why Director Comey reopened the investigation into Clinton’s mishandling of classified information, a move that shook the political world and caused Comey to come under fire. As the NYPD chief put it, the new e-mails contents truly are “alarming.”

@ChristieC733 This is exactly what I was told this weekend, investigators were sick over it went home in tears hugging their kids.

True Pundit also says that, according to FBI sources, both Abedin and Weiner are trying to cut immunity deals with federal officials and that, if they didn’t cooperate, they’d face long prison sentences. Abedin’s turning state’s evidence would no doubt be devastating for Clinton, as the two women have for years been joined at the hip. Abedin has at times been like Clinton’s shadow, has been called her “body woman,” and has even been rumored to be Clinton’s lesbian lover. So Abedin likely knows where, as is said, the bodies are buried.

Of particular note, the new e-mails allegedly contain information revealing that Hillary, Bill Clinton, Weiner, and numerous congressmen took trips to convicted billionaire pedophile Jeffrey Epstein’s private island, where he is said to pimp out underage minors of both sexes to prominent people. The trips were taken aboard Epstein’s Boeing 747, dubbed the “Lolita Express”; the pedophile’s island, in the US Virgin Islands, has been called “Sex Slave Island.”

These revelations would also explain why Clinton used powerful software called BleachBit to scrub damning information from her private server. According to BleachBit’s website, its program gives criminals and others the ability to “shred files to hide their contents and prevent data recovery.”

Yet it can’t scrub bumbling perverts from your personal life, and Weiner’s laptop also contains incriminating e-mails revealing the mishandling of classified information by Abedin and Clinton, say the sources. Both women “sent and received thousands of classified and top secret documents to personal email accounts,” and this information could have been “accessed, printed, discussed, leaked, or distributed by untold numbers … of unknown individuals,” writesTrue Pundit.

Consequently, according to True Pundit, FBI sources say the new Clinton investigation has been broadened and now includes matters such as how:

• Abedin forwarded classified and top secret State Department emails to Weiner’s email

• Abedin stored emails, containing government secrets, in a special folder shared with Weiner warehousing over 500,000 archived State Department emails.

• Weiner had access to these classified and top secret documents without proper security clearance to view the records

• Abedin also used a personal yahoo address and her Clintonemail.com address to send/receive/store classified and top secret documents

• [a] private consultant managed Weiner’s site for the last six years, including three years when Clinton was secretary of state, and therefore, had full access to all emails as the domain’s listed registrant and administrator via Whois email contacts.

If the new allegations in the True Pundit story are all accurate, they just add more intrigue to a presidential campaign that is truly unprecedented, with a torrent of WikiLeaks and Project Veritasrevelations and now Clinton’s Weiner woes. From vote fraud to inciting violence to child sex abuse to pay-for-play to perjury, it’s becoming clear to many that the Democratic Party — and the Clintons in particular — are essentially a criminal syndicate. As former assistant FBI director James Kallstrom said in a Sunday interview, “The Clintons, that’s a crime family, basically. It’s like organized crime. I mean the Clinton Foundation is a cesspool…. God forbid we put someone like that [Clinton] in the White House.” And now we know better why, as I wrote Sunday, this “appears standard FBI sentiment. I personally know of an ex-agent — someone with knowledge of Clinton ‘crime family’ dealings — who I’m told is having trouble sleeping at night due to the prospect of a Clinton presidency.”

All these revelations raise important questions: How could Hillary Clinton and her cohorts have bumbled so badly that they appear a cross between Inspector Clouseau and Boss Tweed?

And if Clinton is so careless with her own personal survival, how can she be trusted with national survival?

Part of the explanation is general incompetence, yet there’s another factor: Both Clintons have engaged in continual criminality over the decades — and have been allowed to skate at every turn. This lack of accountability has led to complacency and ever-increasing brazenness, just as with a child never punished for wrongdoing.

So, finally, perhaps, Clinton corruption has reached critical mass. And with Donald Trump ahead 10 points (according to one respected poll) among the 88 percent of voters who have definitely made up their minds, maybe, come late Tuesday evening, some tossing and turning FBI agents will finally be able to enjoy a good night’s rest.

Jerome Corsi, an investigative reporter for WND who has reported extensively on the email scandal that has plagued Democrat presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, just predicted the biggest scandal in U.S. history was about to break.

Corsi, author of “Partners in Crime,” said he knew something was askew when he first realized in August that top Clinton aide Huma Abedin forwarded work-related emails to her private Yahoo email account, which was completely insecure.

He also said Clinton was doing the same thing.

“Hillary was sending emails from Clintonemail.com to Huma Abedin at Yahoo.com. They were both involved, and they completely compromised the State Department security, because anybody that had the password or username could read, in unredacted form, all these emails in real time,” he said.

Corsi said there should be no doubt as to the criminality of Abedin and Clinton forwarding emails onto Abedin’s Yahoo account.

“That’s obviously a major felony in violation of federal security laws for handling classified information,” he said. “You can’t do that.”

He went to explain that the rules for handling classified materials are that they must be handled through secured channels.

“Clearly, sending these emails to Yahoo.com — and we know some of them had classified material because they’ve been marked classified — is a violation of the law, and it doesn’t require intent,” he added.

Corsi believed the scandal was about to explode because he believed Clinton and Abedin moved all those emails to prepare for a pay-to-play scheme.

Corsi referenced an email that surfaced after WikiLeaks released emails from Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta’s email account. In that email, Podesta suggested to former Clinton State Department Chief of Staff Cheryl Mills that someone should get rid of all unidentified emails.

“This is a crime scheme that stinks,” Corsi said. “I think this is going to be the biggest scandal in U.S. history, and it’s just about to break.”

It’s hard to disagree with him at this point. The amount of recent evidence that appears to suggest that Clinton lied about, well, almost everything concerning her private email server, is bad.

Also working against Clinton in this recent discovery is her shady pay-to-play scheme, in which the former secretary of state sold access to government favors for donations to the Clinton Foundation.

It’s frightening to think what this woman would sell or compromise as president.

Share this story on Facebook and Twitter if you agree that this scandal is about to explode.

On the same day the New York Times published a blockbuster report detailing Hillary Clinton’s use of a secret e-mail server, Clinton’s campaign chairman told Clinton’s chief of staff that “we are going to have to dump all those e-mails so better to do sooner than later.”

“On another matter…and not to sound like Lanny [Davis],” Podesta wrote to Mills, “but we are going to have to dump all those e-mails so better to do sooner than later.”

Podesta’s recommendation was sent at 10:57 p.m. on the same day the New York Timesrevealedthat Clinton had exclusively used a secret, private e-mail server her entire tenure as Secretary of State:

WASHINGTON — Hillary Rodham Clinton exclusively used a personal email account to conduct government business as secretary of state, State Department officials said, and may have violated federal requirements that officials’ correspondence be retained as part of the agency’s record.

Mrs. Clinton did not have a government email address during her four-year tenure at the State Department. Her aides took no actions to have her personal emails preserved on department servers at the time, as required by the Federal Records Act.

Although it is unclear whether Podesta was specifically referring to the tens of thousands of e-mails that Clinton and her staff sent to each other while Clinton served as Secretary of State, the timing of the e-mail — immediately following the publication of the New York Times report which detailed for the first time Clinton’s exclusive use of a secret, off-books e-mail server — suggests that he was indeed referring to the e-mails from Clinton and her staff from 2009 through 2013.

Five days after Podesta told Mills, who served as Clinton’s chief of staff at the State Department and who currently serves as an adviser and attorney to the Democratic presidential candidate, that “we are going to have to dump all those e-mails,” Mills e-mailed Podesta that “we need to clean this up.”

Mills’ panicked e-mail to Podesta came after President Barack Obama publicly claimed that he knew nothing about Clinton’s private e-mail setup until he read about it on the news.

“[Obama] has e-mails from [Clinton],” Mills wrote. “[T]hey do not say state.gov.”

Neither Podesta nor Mills has authenticated the e-mail released by Wikileaks, nor has either denied the record’s authenticity. It is also possible that Podesta’s “dump those emails” recommendation could be a reference to an entirely different batch of e-mails, or it could be a recommendation that Clinton’s inner circle should quickly turn all of the records over to the relevant federal authorities. On March 4, 2015, just two days after Podesta’s e-mail, a congressional committee officially subpoenaed Clinton’s e-mails.

Clinton’s presidential campaign was rocked by news last Friday that the Federal Bureau of Investigation had reopened its criminal investigation of the Democratic nominee’s e-mail setup at the State Department. Recently released national polls show a recent tightening of the race between Clinton and Republican nominee Donald Trump, while state polls suggest that Clinton still has a healthy lead in the race for 270 electoral votes.